Papers – Page 4 – ECSAS 2025

Experiencing Prison through Affect: Memory, Gender and History in 1970s India

Using the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1975) as an entry-point, this paper will chart the everyday experiences of women ‘political prisoners’ in West Bengal, India. By using oral interviews and life-writings (such as autobiographies and memoirs), we will see a nuanced interactions between memory, history and gender, that is opened by narratives of evolving friendships, sisterhood and […]

Political Incarceration, Decolonisation and Internationalism in 20th Century India

In my paper, I propose to centrally focus on a set of prison-writings across genres from Indian incarcerated writers before and after 1947 to critically engage with the question of decolonization within the Indian context. Focusing on a set of memoirs written under the British rule by nationalist activists, and those then written under the […]

Of the Dialectic of Victimhood and Resistance in Prison Memoirs Written by Women Political Prisoners in India

Prisons serve as institutions of the State’s repressive apparatus through mechanisms of discipline and punishment that seek to control resistance and indiscipline. Within women’s prisons, however, these disciplinary mechanisms of control (sometimes more repressive than men’s prisons) are quite similar to the social control that women outside it experience. Surveilling women’s bodies into docility, punishment […]

Socio-Economic Determinants of Food Price Vulnerability in South Asia: A Case Study of India

Following the classic works of Engel (1857) and Houthakker (1957), the share of food in the consumption basket, in addition to its significance for welfare, is considered to be an indicator of the level of development as well. In India, household consumption surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) provide granular information about […]

Socio-economic Inequality, Public Procurement and Agriculture Prices across Indian States: Evidence from NSSO Unit Level Data.

Nearly half of India’s workforce is attached to the agriculture sector, and more than 86 per cent of the farmers are small and marginal. While there is hardly any evidence of economies of scale in Indian agriculture relating to yield, regressive trends clearly exist regarding the price received by farmers of different social and economic […]

Access to Rural Employment and Its Outcomes in Bihar (India): Evidence from Two Surveyed Villages

The study of rural employment dynamics in the surveyed villages of Bihar—Bharri and Nadwan—offers a nuanced understanding of the interplay between economic growth, structural transformation, and labour mobility in a state marked by stark socio-economic disparities. Despite Bihar’s commendable economic growth over the past two decades, the findings reveal that this growth has not been […]

Hanging by a Thread: Ecological Shifts, Agrarian Transformations, and Labor in Northeast India’s Silk Plantations

The paper is based on my doctoral dissertation that is in progress. The dissertation is based on two years (2022-2024) of ethnographic research in Upper Assam and archival research to observe the faultlines in a scaling-up model that is negotiated by agrarian communities and become locally embedded – even if fragmented – to construct claims […]

Labour Absorption in Crop Cultivation in Rural Haryana

The nature of agrarian transition — non-implementation of land reforms, public-expenditure-ledprocess of Green Revolution, and the recent phase of liberalisation in agriculture — that has unfoldedin India has had a profound impact on economic growth and development. India witnessed a periodof absence of structural change in terms of the shift of labour from agriculture to […]

The Climate Factor: Rethinking Agrarian Change and Social Differentiation in Rural India

This necessitates new approaches to studying agrarian change, which focus specifically on the intersections of climate change with the contemporary agrarian question. Much of the existing scholarship on agrarian studies, however, overlooks the serious social distortions produced by climate change. This interdisciplinary paper examines: a) how various social groups – differentiated by class, gender, caste […]

Agrarian Change and Accumulation in Central India: Revisiting the Agrarian Question of Capital

In this paper, we revisit the relevance of the agrarian question of capital and provide evidence of the dynamism in agriculture and its spillover on the non-agrarian accumulation dynamics based on an empirical enquiry. We study the possibilities, channels and patterns of agrarian accumulation in an agriculturally advanced region lying in central India. Our data […]